Tuesday, October 09, 2007

UK's Times Online Inserts "Gun Control" into Wisconsin Shooting Story

The powerful American gun lobby, however, remains adamant that restrictions on what they claim as the constitutional right to possess firearms would only make killings more likely. Some argue that the Virginia Tech massacre would have been prevented if other students had been allowed to carry guns. They will also argue that little could have been done to stop a sheriff's deputy possessing a weapon.

But supporters of gun control cite the example of Britain, which has some of the tightest firearms laws in the world and where just 50 people were killed in 2005-06 as a result of gun crime. The latest figure in the US is for 2004, when 10,654 people were killed by gunfire.

Leave it to the UK's "authorized journalists" to insert this into the mix.

Not that ours are any better. Perceptive "gun bloggers" are noticing a peculiar trend: If it were a "civilian," the fact that an "assault rifle" was used would be a key component of the media hysterics. Many news outlets aren't even mentioning the weapon, or are simply saying "rifle".

The New York Times actually goes one better, identifying the weapon as "an automatic rifle." At this point, I'm not sure what the hell it was, but the glaring disparity in treatment certainly is...uh...interesting.

5 comments:

Kent McManigal said...

Why do the victim disarmament pinheads worry about how someone is murdered? They focus on how many people in Great Britain are killed by "gun crime", but don't mention other ways of being murdered. I don't care how a murder is committed, I think all murders are bad, unlike these people who only care if a gun was used to murder someone. To me this shows that they don't care at all about people, but only about control.

Anonymous said...

It's not just any rifle, it's a "patrol rifle".

David Codrea said...

Yes, Anon. I meant to link to "Armed & Safe" when I posted this but was having Internet connectivity issues. I've gone back in to this post and rectified that (see link under "perceptive 'gun bloggers'".

Anonymous said...

Most press aren't bothering to mention it was ISSUED to him, either.

Sean said...

Meanwhile, several million patrol rifles held by civilians harmed no one today.